Tag: progressivism

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ideological culture too much government

Seize the Epoch

President Obama was sworn in for a second term on Sunday, re-​enacting the rite on Monday so he could leverage the attention of a traditional news day.

Obama makes a good speech. He intones “We, the People,” with a pause in the middle: “We … the People.” He tells us to seize the moment.

But I’m not at all sure he’s seizing — or sizing up — the facts. He says, “we, the people, understand that our country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it.” As I understand it, those who do very well have increased in number. Many folks have moved out of the middle-​income earning category into the upper regions. We’ve more millionaires now than ever — even adjusted for inflation. Their ranks aren’t exactly shrinking.

Many of us are struggling, though. And we struggle under the watch of a general “progressive” mindset. You can’t blame income trends on the “free market.” Though some sectors of the economy are pretty free — the important new technology sector, for instance, and much of consumer retail — the medical and financial sectors are heavily regulated and managed by government, and the housing market has been transformed by multiple government policy initiatives. And here, with these three institutions, is where we’ve taken the biggest hits.

And where some of the worst effects on the poorer amongst us can be felt — and where the biggest pro-​rich policies can be seen. Think bailouts, for starters.

The Progressives long ago seized the epoch. The necessity of the moment is to seize it back from them. Their policies of government intrusion and management have rigged the game to get us where we are now.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture links

Townhall: Racist Anti-Racism

This weekend’s Townhall column is about race. It is long, in part because talking about race is still so tricky that brief discussions can be easily taken out of context.

And there’s so much to say.

I expand on some comments I made on Friday. But I try to spell out the logic at greater length. So it doesn’t get missed. Racism is an affront to justice. Justice tries to mete out what people deserve, individually. It is especially concerned about establishing basic rules of how to behave. It doesn’t answer every problem of society. It answers crime with punishment and restitution, answers torts with redress. But it does so based on individual responsibility.

Racism is wrong because it judges individuals not on their merits, but by their race. It’s stupid as well as ugly and unjust.

Progressives, however, have been trying to overthrow the old idea of justice as personal freedom and individual responsibility since Progressivism first became an Era.

So it’s no wonder they spread a response to racism that is itself racist. They don’t understand what justice is. So they make an unjust response to an injustice.

Anyway, go over to the column and give it a read. Come back here and tell me what you think.

You will probably be brimming with ideas, complaints, responses. Fine. Me too. One idea I couldn’t include in the column was the sources for some of today’s inner-​city African-​American problems. It sure seems like they’ve been selected, by racists, for some horrible burdens. But I wouldn’t be hasty on this.

It’s certainly true that official policy has played a huge role in destroying a lot of lives in the inner cities (especially but not limited to African-​Americans) — the progressive trifecta of minimum wage raises, welfare aid to families without in-​home fathers, and the war on drugs, has devastated the culture of many inner city blacks. Some folks call one of more of these policies “racist,” but the intent, usually, has seemed to be color-​blind. That these policies have hit African-​American communities especially hard may be more of an accident of history than a policy of repression. But I could be wrong.

Writers from my perspective were once called liberal. Self-​defined “Progressives” took over that word in the FDR era. But that hasn’t stopped us from continuing to uphold a commonsense view of justice. Important contributions to the study and advocacy of this concept of justice as they relate to racial issues include

  • The Economics of the Colour Bar, by W.H. Hutt
  • The Other Side of Racism, by Anne Wortham
  • Race and Culture, by Thomas Sowell
  • Black Rednecks and White Liberals, by Thomas Sowell
  • The State Against Blacks, by Walter Williams

These are all books worth looking up. For further reading about the links between laissez-​faire individualism and true anti-​racism, you couldn’t do better than start your reading here: